Word Type
Unit can be an adjective or a noun.
unit used as an adjective:
- For each unit.
"We have to keep our unit costs down if we want to make a profit." - Having a size or magnitude of one.
"All solutions lie within the unit disc centered at the origin."
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
unit used as a noun:
- A standard measure of a quantity.
"The centimetre is a unit of length." - An organized group comprising people and/or equipment.
"He was a member of a special police unit." - A self-contained military organization; usually a battalion, regiment, or naval ship.
- A member of a military organization.
"The fifth tank brigade moved in with 20 units. (i.e., 20 tanks)" - Any military element whose structure is prescribed by competent authority, such as a table of organization and equipment; specifically, part of an organization.
- An organization title of a subdivision of a group in a task force.
- A standard or basic quantity into which an item of supply is divided, issued, or used. In this meaning, also called unit of issue.
- With regard to Reserve Components of the Armed Forces, denotes a Selected Reserve unit organized, equipped, and trained for mobilization to serve on active duty as a unit or to augment or be augmented by another unit. Headquarters and support functions without wartime missions are not considered units.
- An element of a ring having a multiplicative inverse. (Formerly just the identity element 1R of a ring.)
- (commerce) An item which may be sold singly.
"We shipped nearly twice as many units this month as last month." - (UK) (electricity) One kilowatt-hour (as recorded on an electricity meter).
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is unit?
- Adjective usage: We have to keep our unit costs down if we want to make a profit.
- Adjective usage: All solutions lie within the unit disc centered at the origin.
- Noun usage: The centimetre is a unit of length.
- Noun usage: He was a member of a special police unit.
- Noun usage: The fifth tank brigade moved in with 20 units. (i.e., 20 tanks)
- Noun usage: We shipped nearly twice as many units this month as last month.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of unit are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of unit, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
